We're running a new series on Ars over the next few weeks about “the future of work,” which will involve (among other things) some predictions about how folks in and out of offices will do their future officing. To start, let's take a tour of the fabled Ars Orbiting HQ—because we've learned a lot about how work works in the future, and we'd love to share some details about how we do what we do.

Ars bucks the trend of most digital newsrooms in that we truly are an all-digital newsroom. While we have mail stops at the Condé Nast mothership in New York, there is no physical Ars Technica editorial office. Instead, Ars Technica's 30-ish editorial staff work from their homes in locations scattered across the country. We’ve got folks in all US time zones and even a few contributors in far-flung locations across the Atlantic.

Marshaling this many remote staffers into a news-and-feature-writing machine can have its challenges, but Ars has operated this way for more than twenty years. We’ve gotten pretty good at it, all things considered. The main way to make it work is to hire self-sufficient, knowledge-hungry people, but another major part of our remote work philosophy is flexibility. Not everyone works the same way, and remote work should never be treated like a one-size-fits-all, time-clocked job. Also, tools matter—you can’t expect people to do collaborative jobs like writing and editing without giving them the right hardware and software.

Sam, our video executive producer, is a man of refined tastes, in both movies and furniture.

Senior Reviews Editor Samuel Axon takes advantage of the lovely LA weather most days and works like this.

Samuel Axon

Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland kicks it old school with a pocket game shrine.

Kyle Orland

Tech Culture Editor Sam Machkovech's standing-desk zone. You can't see the "anti-fatigue mat" on the floor below but you can see one of Sam's all-time favorite accessories: the 3M Precise Mousing Surface.

Sam Machkovech

It's not hard to work out who this office belongs to. At this point we think Automotive Editor Jonathan Gitlin is trolling the rest of us with the untidy state of his desk.

Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

The mothership

Ars Technica has been around for a while—the site was started in 1998, which is several epochs ago in computer time. As founder & Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher added writers to the staff, the model he followed was to treat Ars almost like an institution of academia, with "professors" (the writers) functioning as dedicated subject-matter experts who undertook their own research and story development. This is a model the site retains to this day; while there is obviously central oversight, writers generally are expected to be the experts in their areas, to find most of their stories, and to manage their own output.

Much of the early Ars staff had academic backgrounds not in technology or even in journalism, but in the humanities—and this influenced what has become the traditional "Ars style." "It was not an MBA-driven place with ideas about 'productivity' and 'management,'" says Deputy Editor Nate Anderson of those early years. "It was something that smart people loved doing, and they went out and did it DIY-style, pursuing their own interests and finding places where those overlapped with reader interest. I'd like to think that this produced some of the 'humanity' present in Ars, even as it produced good results for a site that survived many ad-driven downturns and industry shakeouts."

After operating independently for a decade, Ars Technica was acquired by Condé Nast in 2008, marking a major change to the business side of the site. Editorially, our culture and practices remain largely unchanged, but sales, marketing, HR, and legal are now handled by Condé Nast teams. They're passionate about the things we are not passionate about, which works out really well for both of us.

For our sister publications, Condé manages the technology choices for its brands, including everything from the publishing system to the OS and browser versions sitting on someone's desk, but Ars maintains our own publishing system, hardware, and communications. We do this because we believe the experience translates to a degree of expertise and because we love to tweak, optimize, and then tweak some more.

For editorial staff, our technology choices cater to employee preference. In days gone by, that might have meant Thinkpads and Palm Treos (shudder), but these days the majority of the staff are on Macbooks of one flavor or another. (Of course, if a staffer wanted to use their self-built God Box, that would be fine, too, as long as they follow some basic security best practices). But, Ars has no official operating system—Senior Space Editor Eric Berger rocks out with his Chromebook, and if I told networkmaster Jim Salter that he had to use nothing but a Mac, I’m pretty sure he’d sneak into my house and murder me in my sleep. Our only concern with the hardware we use is that it be secure and up to date.

The Condé Nast offices at 1 World Trade Center are fancy. Did you know there's an entire gallery dedicated to showing off original New Yorker cartoons?

Lee Hutchinson

You can also see the Statue of Liberty from there.

Lee Hutchinson

The views from 1WTC are pretty fantastic. That's one thing you probably won't get in a home office!

Lee Hutchinson

Daily drivers

Here’s a brief run-down of the tools and applications Ars uses to get work done.

For official communications, where it’s important to have a record, Ars relies on good-old email. Email absolutely has a place in the modern office, and attempts to work without it are often based on bogglingly wrong-headed misunderstandings of what email is for and why one might use it, as seen in comments like this:

Slack affords levels of inclusion and transparency email simply doesn’t. With email the original author gets to pick who is included in the conversation and whose voices won’t be heard. That’s not the company we want.

Away CEO Steph Korey

Though ancient in Internet terms, email has yet to be dethroned as the most accessible and extensible way to send on-record communications between folks in the same office. It functions the same way as memos did in the old days (though you may be forgiven if you've never actually seen a paper office memo—I'm 41 and I've never seen an actual paper memo in my whole career, unless you count an emailed memo that someone printed out). Unlike instant messaging or hosted platforms like Slack, email is the one piece of messaging technology that you can reasonably expect to work pretty much anywhere and under pretty much any circumstances. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it's an asynchronous tool that you can deal with when you have time—there's no mental pressure to deal with an email the instant it comes in. It's perfect for compartmentalized discussions that don't need to happen live.

We used a locally hosted Exchange SBS and then managed Office 365 email for a number of years, but with so many staffers preferring Macs, and with Outlook for Mac being what it was, we eventually decided to save money and migrate to GSuite. Condé Nast as a whole followed suit about a year later, and the jury is still out on whether or not everyone in the building thinks Gmail is utterly terrible or amazingly great. The answer to that seems to depend on how much one likes Outlook. GSuite provides a bunch of other collaborative tools that we use, too—most notably Sheets, which I’ll get to in a moment.

For our primary “office” environment, we (along with most other media companies in the world) use Slack, the collaborative work tool that everyone loves to hate. Slack is where we discuss story ideas, workshop headlines, ask for help or a quick edit, and dodge work by sharing dumb gifs with each other.

A normal workday morning on Slack. Today the Ars staff is tackling the tough journalism question of trying to figure out what birds they are, based on an online quiz.

A redacted screenshot of my inbox. We use GSuite for e-mail at Ars. Staffers are free to use whatever mail app they'd like. I'm too old to care anymore so I just use the webmail interface.

Logging in to the Ars CMS with Duo. You can authenticate with a hardware token directly on this screen, or enter a Google Authenticator-style TOTP code. Or, you can do what most folks do and tap "Send me a push," which delivers a push login request to your device of choice.

Tapping on the notification opens the Duo app, where you can approve or deny the login.

After tapping "approve," you're logged in. Behold, WordPress.

Because there’s no substitute for talking to your coworkers, Ars staffers also all have Polycom voice-over-IP phones that support 3-digit extension dialing via OnSIP. We also have a couple of conference bridges that we can dial into and use, both for meetings between staffers and also for conferencing with outside sources.

Obviously none of us would have a job for very long if we didn’t actually, you know, write stuff, and that’s where the content management system (CMS) comes in. Every news site uses some manner of CMS—it’s the thing that you put stories into so those stories can be published. Since 2012, Ars has used WordPress as its CMS. It’s not terribly obvious, since we’ve done a fair bit of customization, but you are indeed reading a WordPress site right now.

Finally, a word on security. Ars Security Editor Dan Goodin is a staunch advocate for two-factor authentication ("2FA" for short) everywhere you can get it, and we believe in practicing what we preach. Ars mandates the use of 2FA on every system we use where it's available. Our preferred 2FA solution is Duo, which provides push notifications for 2FA prompts and also supports hardware tokens like Yubikeys, if you've got them. Duo has a very good WordPress plugin and can also be used to provide 2FA for ssh logins and sudo on a variety of Linux distros. (Duo is priced per user account, and it's free if you need fewer than ten accounts. I've been using the free tier to protect my own servers at home for years, and I'm very happy with the service.)

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Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com

Though I did feel my blood pressure rise when you pointed out the Polycom phones...last place I worked had those and they were an absolute nightmare freezing and dropping out on a regular basis for no apparent reason, sometimes dropping important client calls in the process, other times just being garbled unintelligible audio.

I miss the old Nortel PBX that was rock solid even in power failures (massive battery backup, real copper external trunks) but at least the new place I'm at has Cisco phones that have been mostly stable.

How about file storage? Thats the one most major thing that keeps my office coming back in every day. Sifting through TBs of photos, customer records, drawings, 3d models, scans, etc seems to be impossible (or at very least improbable) to do when fully locked in "the cloud".

Slack is awful and distracting from work. And documents via G Suite is similarly a productivity kneecapping compared to MS Office.

We used slack and gsuite at work and I honestly didn’t hate it until we switched to office 365 and Teams and realized just how far behind GSuite was and just how terrible, clunky, bloated and ill thought out slack is as a communications and collaboration tool.

Those are great photos of your workspaces, but how much cleanup did you all have to do beforehand? (C'mon, be honest...)

I have two young kids (6yrs; 17 mos) and my desk is the surface nearest the front door, so I definitely had to relocate a pile of child stuff off it it for the time being.

Mostly though, I try to keep my desk clean. If it's not clean I end up procrastinating on my work by cleaning it.

I was going to say I can tell we're fellow Wirecutter devotees, judging by your choice of office chair.

I really wish my org had better remote collaboration tools. I work in an office but I'm remote from almost everyone in my dept. meaning that we need a good work queue system. Right now it's a constant struggle keeping my boss up on what I'm doing and keeping track of just exactly what I'm supposed to be doing in the first place. Kind of the worst of both worlds, really. Gotta be at work and fight the remote work crap, too.

How about file storage? Thats the one most major thing that keeps my office coming back in every day. Sifting through TBs of photos, customer records, drawings, 3d models, scans, etc seems to be impossible (or at very least improbable) to do when fully locked in "the cloud".

We don't have a file storage solution, beyond Google Drive (which I don't really use). Typically if we're sharing large images they're story-related, so we shove them up onto the CDN and magic happens. Otherwise, wetransfer and dropbox work in a pinch to move big stuff around.

And it's worth noting that this seems true outside of Ars, too. It's common to be invited to a corporate video Zoom meeting, or a Microsoft Teams meeting, and have no one on video anyway; everyone still insists on dialing in.

I think this is much a people thing as a technology thing. I know an awful lot of people that absolutely, positively refuse to allow their video camera to be turned on for any reason. It only takes a few of those in a meeting and all of a sudden everyone is turning off their cameras.

Which is a shame, because I believe being able to see someone actually does improve the conversation.

And it's worth noting that this seems true outside of Ars, too. It's common to be invited to a corporate video Zoom meeting, or a Microsoft Teams meeting, and have no one on video anyway; everyone still insists on dialing in.

I think this is much a people thing as a technology thing. I know an awful lot of people that absolutely, positively refuse to allow their video camera to be turned on for any reason. It only takes a few of those in a meeting and all of a sudden everyone is turning off their cameras.

Which is a shame, because I believe being able to see someone actually does improve the conversation.

I think it's still mostly tech, in my experience. Video is easily a 10x increase in bandwidth and that has big implications for QoS, especially when the participant count starts to get large. I'd take dependable verbal-only over unreliable video chat any day. Even just broadcasting a slide show causes issues sometimes.

I have the theory (which I'm sure is neither uniquely mine nor particularly novel) that we would do ourselves and our environment a lot of good if *all of us* who could physically and technically work from home actually do it. All the time. Mind you, all needs the due research:

- Less commuting = (Massively?) less emissions- Less time wasted commuting: more free time, more sleep, more time with the family- Less commuting = lower gas expenses- Fewer people concentrating in big cities -> less gentrification- Less city space used on office buildings -> reduction of housing prices- For those who *have* to commute: freer roads, less traffic, easier commuting

Better quality of life, money saving and emission reduction. What's not to love?

Our company is made up of multiple acquisitions - and each division or region has their own established communication method. Microsoft Teams, Cisco Jabber, WebEx Teams, and I think there's a shadow group on Slack that refuses to join anyone else (jealous).

Leadership is starting to see the chinks in the armor here as more tribal knowledge begins to be retained in these platforms and how absolutely visceral the reactions of many to switch to a common platform that isn't their own can be.

There is a relevant XKCD here on introducing another standard but I'll just let you imagine it in your head - you've seen it a hundred times.

I love my home office, it's a dedicated room that I can leave when I'm done working. That has saved my marriage. It helps if I leave my phone in there, too.

To be honest I'm surprised at the setups, I definitely expected better desk setups considering you work from home and spent a great deal of time there. Eric Bangeman's and Valentina's do look perfect for working from home, all others seem to be weirdly placed or lack things that would make work faster and more comfortable in my opinion.

p.s.Some aren't bad, but don't look like a work setup for someone who works from home.

Unfortunately, my home office comes with one highly persistent accessory that makes it rather hard to work; this is why I try not to work from home too much:

Spoiler: show

Tools-wise, we never really got on with Slack at my place, but - and I say this as no MS lover - Teams seems to have stuck and finally banished Skype from work-life at least. We're highly globally distributed teams (across Europe and indeed China), and we use it for audio/video conferencing and screen sharing as well as text chat, alongside things like the calendar integration with Office365 being really good.

Working in China, anything Googly isn't really an option - Office365 also works well there. In general, as a dedicated lifelong Unix & Mac guy, I do have to give credit to MS for Office365. I use (my own, paid for) O365 business subscription for my own email needs as well as for work - mostly a hangover from the days when I ran my own consultancy, but I find it's still well worth the value.

I've always dreamed of working from home. I'm a natural introvert so office environments make me anxious just by their nature. There's something very Trekky about working and living in the same space...

To be honest I'm surprised at the setups, I definitely expected better desk setups considering you work from home and spent a great deal of time there. Eric Bangeman's and Valentina's do look perfect for working from home, all others seem to be weirdly placed or lack things that would make work faster and more comfortable in my opinion.

p.s.Some aren't bad, but don't look like a work setup for someone who works from home.

Yeah, how dare these people not be far more financially well off to afford fancier home offices! - Says local non-subscriber

Though I did feel my blood pressure rise when you pointed out the Polycom phones...last place I worked had those and they were an absolute nightmare freezing and dropping out on a regular basis for no apparent reason, sometimes dropping important client calls in the process, other times just being garbled unintelligible audio.

I miss the old Nortel PBX that was rock solid even in power failures (massive battery backup, real copper external trunks) but at least the new place I'm at has Cisco phones that have been mostly stable.

A few jobs back, I worked at a company that ran a medium sized NOC for a handful of Fortune 500/Fortune 1000 companies. While there, I sat diagonally across from the person who was the lead VOIP support technician.

Memories.

Anyway, this just makes me jealous of the people who have enough CAT5/5E/6 in their house to make VOIP a viable solution. Having power running through copper is nice - just ask my parents, former COBOL programmers who still have multiple POTS lines. House was built in 1948.

If you're being honest, just admit that battery backups suck.

Is there a reason why most of these solutions don't run another circuit for power alongside the twisted pair?

This article is really close to home for me. For one, my office is fairly close from WTC, the view IS nice.

We don't do work from home too much as a company, but tech oriented teams are pretty liberal with it. The last section of article talked to me, specially the bit about getting out of your PJ's. Also, as a introvert, I feel going to office is better for some self-improvement.